SAN FRANCISCO — It was one thing when Jeff Kent came back to SBC Park dressed up as a Houston Astro. The past few days, he has learned how different it is showing up clad in Los Angeles Dodger blue.

Kent is the only former San Francisco Giants MVP ever to play for the Dodgers. But for all those RBIs he accumulated for the Giants, it’s as if he never played here now.

During the season opener Tuesday, even during a moment of silence for Pope John Paul II, the veteran second baseman fielded all manner of insults and obscenities from the stands. Many were blue, too.

Right here is where a Los Angeles Times columnist like Bill Plaschke or T.J. Simers would jump in and offer up, “And that’s about all he fielded.”

Kent wept when he signed with the Dodgers in the off-season. But a day into the regular season, he already was sitting by his locker Wednesday evening percolating with his more familiar general discontent.

After Day 1, when the Dodgers booted the ball around like Finnish soccer players in a 4-2 loss to the Giants, Kent and his teammates were fairly well-barbecued in the pages of the Times. Simers referred to Kent as “the statue” and then asked shortstop Cesar Izturis to make a comparison between Kent and his departed predecessor, Alex Cora.

You can imagine how well Kent took these assessments and other general disparagements of his teammates, including a reference to fifth starter Scott Erickson as “Mr. Lisa Guerrero.” And that was just Simers.

Plaschke took his own pokes at the Dodgers defense, GM Paul DePodesta (you remember him) and manager Jim Tracy.

While talking to Kent with some other reporters, Simers arrived for a conference the second baseman had requested. Apparently Kent didn’t get the memo that Simers delights in skewering the L.A. sports scene, all in the spirit of giving his readers a good laugh.

Kent, however, wasn’t laughing. He wasn’t even smiling. There were no raised voices or fisticuffs, but there were some rather terse exchanges, with Kent essentially ending the conversation by saying Simers could write what he wanted to write but not expect him to be party to his, ahem, manure.

Hey, and it’s only Day 2 in Dodgerland.

Kent has always been a bit sensitive about his defense, and he’s already decidedly chippy about the way Dodgers writers are harping about how much the situation has deteriorated from last year. When one L.A. writer persisted in dredging up the Tuesday misplays, Kent boiled over a bit.

“You guys are killing a dead dog,” he said. “You wore it out in spring training, and now you’re going to wear it out some more. My comments have always been that defense doesn’t win the World Series. If the defense was so good here last year as you guys think it was, then why the (bleep) did they not win? That’s where my frustration comes from … open your eyes.

“That was a great question for yesterday, not today,” Kent continued. “Today I’m focused on trying to win the game today. Things happen, and they happened. We only had four or five hits going into the ninth inning, and that’s not good enough, either.”

Naturally, I had approached Kent to ask him about playing with Omar Vizquel when both were with Cleveland in 1996 and what he thought the impact of Vizquel paired with former teammate J.T. Snow might be. He was generally complimentary, but when I mentioned the leaping double play Vizquel turned in the ninth inning of Tuesday’s opener, Kent had a strange assessment.

“I’ve seen him make it before, and I don’t doubt that he could make it again,” he said. “I don’t think it was that great. I think it’s what he does. There’s dozens of guys who can make that play. Some guys can make plays look harder than they really are.”

(We defer to the L.A. Times for the appropriate comeback here.)

Kent, who grew up in the Los Angeles suburb of Bellflower, was weaned on the Dodgers-Giants rivalry and attended many games at Dodger Stadium with his dad as a youth. That’s why it’s not all that startling to see him playing for them now even though he spent so many productive years with the Giants.

I asked him how it felt coming back to San Francisco dressed in enemy garb.

“I thought it was going to be bigger than it was,” he said. “No big deal, really. They got on me pretty good when I came in here with Houston last year, so what I heard yesterday wasn’t much of a surprise.”

Kent might be surprised by what he hears when the Dodgers finally get back to L.A., though. Then again, by the look on his face Wednesday, sounds as if he’s already hearing it.

Violent police encounters in California last year led to the deaths of 157 people and six officers, the state attorney general’s office said Thursday in a report that provides the first statewide tally on police use-of-force incidents.

At 6:03 p.m. Wednesday, police responded to reports of the robbery at the facility, 2301 Bancroft way, and learned that a man who snuck into the facility and began prowling through the building, taking cell phones and wallets from victims.

Investigators’ efforts to solve the case led to the arrests of Pablo Mendoza, 25, of Hayward, Brandon Follings, 26, of Oakland and Valeria Boden, 26, of Alameda, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office said Thursday.